You know what, damn it. Strike Commander just boils my blood every time, and we'll see if I can get through this without any banworthy language. Rant time!
Let's start with Chris' version of the story in full:
Strike Commander manual p46-47 said:
Recently, I watched the film Heart of Darkness, which chronicled the tremendous struggles that Francis Ford Coppola went through in crating Apocalypse Now. In many ways, the creation of Strike Commander has helped me identify with his plight.
It was two and half years ago, just after the release of Wing Commander, that I started out on what I then estimated to be a one-year project. I set out to create an industry shattering flight simulator that would encompass a revolutionary new 3-D system, a system that I planned to use for Wing Commander III and hoped would form the basis of a whole new generation of ORIGIN games. This system, which we later named RealSpace™, became the heart of Strike Commander. To make RealSpace truly revolutionary we decided to gamble on two major graphics techniques: Gouraud shading and texture mapping. Both of these techniques are used extensively on high-end military flight simulators costing millions of dollars. Their application gives rendered 3-D images a much more realistic and fluid appearance. Because of the power needed to implement such a 3-D system, nobody had previously dreamed of doing so on a PC. For us to pull off this software, we knew we had to make some risky assumptions. First, that the power-to-price ratio of PCs would continue to decline, thereby delivering affordable PCs of adequate speed to our target market. Second, and more importantly, that the same forces that had created a demand for Wing Commander — those power-hungry 386 owners — would generate a demand for games that exploited the next generation of PCs, the 486. When creating Wing Commander, there were many who doubted the game would sell because of their lack of faith in the high-end PC market. This time, however, everyone believed in the market and, as time went on, the doubts revolved around our ability to create the engine.
In the spirit of wanting it all, we set out to design a game that would have more realism than the best flight simulator, better storytelling, more fun and more accessibility than Wing Commander, and the best sound effects, music and graphics of any game ever created. Our biggest mistake was thinking that we could achieve all of this in a single year. Our biggest setback was the realization that it would take more than two. But our journey had begun and there was no turning back. Perhaps the greatest heartbreak came months after the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991. Believing ourselves to be a few months from completion, we showed a demo of Strike in front of the press and our competitors. Months later, we were little closer to completion, but a subtle change had come over our competitors’ development plans. All of the sudden, parts of the technology we had shown at CES were showing up in their software. It wasn’t as if they had stolen our ideas — after all, the techniques we used to make RealSpace revolutionary for PCs are very well known in the high-end graphics field. The trouble was that nobody believed it could be done on the PC. With a single ill-timed demo, we had changed that belief and inadvertently given our competitors a heads-up on where we wanted to take the industry a full year and a half before we arrived there. During these revelations it was difficult to resist the temptation to push Strike out early and prevent our competitors from stealing any more of our thunder. But to stop short of our vision would have been unacceptable. We were in the middle of our journey and were determined to complete it, regardless of what lay ahead. And what lay ahead was the hardest part: long hours, short tempers and huge expectations.
In hindsight, knowing what a truly Herculean task Strike Commander turned into, the heartache and disappointment it created when its release date was constantly pushed back, and the amount of time from our personal lives that it consumed, we probably should have designed it differently. We wouldn’t have tried to do quite as much or shot quite as high. In our arrogance we had set out to create something that was not only better than everything else, it was several orders of magnitude bettre. And it was several orders of magnitude more expensive as well — in fact, the most expensive game ORIGIN has ever developed. Like Francis Ford Coppola and his film crew on Apocalypse Now, we knew we were in way over our heads, but we also knew there was no turning back.
And now, a little humbler, we’ve reached the end of our long and arduous journey. We look at Strike Commander and see a game that every member of the team can say, “Yes, it was two years of hell, but at the end of it we’ve created something that is very special and I’m proud of it.” I have never seen such selfless dedication from such talented individuals as the team that created it. Strike Commander is the game it is because of them. Each time I think about the dark circles under my eyes, the unshaven beards, the late night pizzas and the neglected spouses and girlfriends, I wonder what it is that makes us do this. One reason might be that the entire Strike Commander team , which has grown to as many as twenty people, are all avid computer game players. We buy and play our competitors’ games, looking forward to the latest developments in our field. If we weren’t writing games as a profession, we would be hating our day jobs and writing them at night. I hope this makes us as demanding and discriminating as anyone that plays our games. Although it sounds clichéd, for us it is much more than a job. I can think of no greater pride it would bring a team member than to have someone approach him at a computer store and tell him that Strike Commander was the best game they’ve ever played.
We hope you’ll agree.
This little nugget came out in 1993, and as we can see, true to form, Chris wants to paint it as revolutionary, industry-changing, unprecedented, and best ever. But, again, it came out in
1993. I harp on the year because it is a rather special year in computer gaming. It was indeed a seminal year for games, and especially for the PC gaming scene, but none of it had to do with Chris — hell, it didn't have anything to do with the actual production-value powerhouse that was Origin Systems.
What came out in 1993?
•
Doom. The game that, while it didn't invent the 3D first-person shooter genre,
defined it, with audiovisual quality that was through the roof, to say nothing of the networked realtime multiplayer fighting that is a multi-billion (or is it trillion by now?) dollar industry today.
•
Myst. One of
the most popular computer games ever, irrespective of genre or format. Along with
7th Guest, also released in 1993, it was the killer app that sold the CD ROM as a format and a peripheral, and much like Doom did for the FPS, defined the concept of multimedia gaming.
•
X-Wing. Take the space shooter concept that had been popular for a couple of years, make it actual 3D, throw a huge IP behind it, and focus on gameplay above all else. Again, it did not invent the genre, but it absolutely defined and nailed what works and what does not.
•
Virtua Fighter. Take the well-established and still popular fighting genre —
Mortal Kombat II came out in 1993 as well and the
Street Fighter series was in-between games — and make it 3D, thus setting the stage for where they will all go in a few years.
While they weren't seminal in and of themselves, a number of other games came out that pushed their genres ahead and set the stage for the future:
•
Daytona USA and
Ridge Racer for the kind of 3D arcade racers that would be the new standard from there on.
•
Day of the Tentacle,
Gabriel Knight, and
Sam and Max probably mark the peak of the adventure gaming genre, pushing it into the realm of CD-based multimedia.
•
Masters of Orion and
Syndicate. I mention them because some people will hurt me if I don't.
And that's not even mentioning such absolute classics as
A Link to the Past,
Star Fox,
Super Mario All Stars,
Aladdin,
Sonic CD,
Eye of the Beholder III, or
Alone in the Dark II — games that, in spite of being spectacular or critical components in what would be genre-defining games a few years down the road, still paled in importance in comparison to the actual revolution that was going on at the same time.
As for Origin, they weren't exactly sleeping, but they were focusing on add-ons, spin-offs, and tried and trusted product series: Ultima VII-2, Privateer, and Ultima Underworld II. None of them offered anything new.
Hardware-wise, we had a generation shift with the Sega Mega CD, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Amiga CD32, and — perhaps most interestingly — the Sega Model 2 system. It is interesting because of one particular feature: its hardware-accelerated texturing and shading, supporting among other things… Gouraud shading of polygonal models. No matter how much Chris wants to strut his stuff over the '91 CES demo, no, Sega
did not look at what some niche-genre dev on PC did and invented custom hardware to do the same thing in the year and a half between the expo and the system release. This was a parallel process that was happing industry-wide, all at the same time because the time was right.
Oh, and a tiny little chip manufacturer that was probably not worth mentioning released something called the “Pentium”? And across town in Santa Clara, a bunch of upstarts got together to form a company called nVidia…
So yeah, 1993 was an insane year as far as pushing the games industry forward. For all his bluster, Chris Roberts was not relevant to that development. He was doing his own thing, breaking budgets and being second (or third) on the ball like always, way out in the periphery. This would also be the only sensible explanation for the downright obscurantist idea that PC hardware might not continue on the trajectory set by the 386 (from 1985) and 486 (released in 1989).
